EU?prefers quartet to solo in Middle East

Russian policy is opaque, US influence is in doubt and the new secretary-general of the United Nations is still finding his feet. It is reasonable to ask why the EU - as the fourth member of the Middle East quartet - is so eager to revitalise the group.

The answer is perhaps desperation. It is hard to find a European diplomat who is not filled with deep gloom about the Middle East.

In the last year, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been too weak to engage in a meaningful peace process. In the absence of substantial international engagement, the situation has deteriorated.

European efforts to push even the smallest of steps have failed, while the Palestinian territories may be in the first throes of a civil war.

Since summer 2006, the German foreign ministry has been laying the groundwork for a fresh diplomatic push to resolve the crisis during its presidencies of the EU and the G8, which began on 1 January.

In the last six months Germany has lobbied, cajoled and pleaded for the quartet to play a more prominent role in resolving the Middle East conflict.

Although the outlook is bleak, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, has invested a great deal of political capital in increasing the EU’s profile in the region. He has travelled to the Middle East on six occasions since taking office in November 2005.

Steinmeier has been willing to take political risks to augment the EU’s role, at a time when US influence was in question. In December he chose to travel to Damascus to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a move which Israel condemned. Although the results of his trip now appear meagre, many considered it an important message to Syria that the EU remained engaged.

This month Germany appeared to succeed in its efforts. During a visit to Washington on 4 January Chancellor Angela Merkel convinced US President George W. Bush to dispatch Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state, to the region. Merkel also appeared to have Bush’s agreement to hold a meeting of the quartet on the fringes of a Lebanese donors’ conference, which will take place in Paris on 25 January.

After visiting the US, Merkel said that "the quartet…is paralysed in the face of recent developments, but it remains the most effective institutional possibility for co-ordinating international efforts in the region".

But German ambitions were not realised. Rice left for the Middle East with the focus firmly on Iraq and with indications that the US’ primary concern in the region is not the peace process, but Iran’s seemingly growing influence.

The quartet meeting has now been postponed apparently because of scheduling problems. These scheduling difficulties, real or otherwise, only highlight the problems Germany faces in its attempts to restart the peace process and the tough choices the quartet must now take.

These difficulties are not simply a matter of reconciling differences, for example, between France and Spain over how much to engage Syria.

Germany faces the immediate problem of creating a policy that can prevent the total collapse of the Palestinian state and its institutions.

Berlin wants the quartet to agree small steps to make life easier for ordinary Palestinians and to show that President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party can govern.

That is, in part, a response to the reality that Fatah is unlikely to join the elected government of Hamas. Over the last year, EU-backed talks between Fatah and Hamas to create a national unity government advanced only in fits and starts and now, finally, seem to have collapsed. Recognition of Israel and an end to armed conflict were steps too far for some of Hamas’s leadership.

In supporting Abbas, Germany is likely to receive US support, but hugging Abbas too close may simply make Fatah less appealing to its Palestinian electorate. But neither the German nor US governments are making any apologies for picking sides: Hamas, they point out, is on both EU and US terrorist lists.

But an EU policy of support for Fatah is out of kilter with the growing support in the region for parties with a strongly Islamist character.

As one commentator remarked: "Europe has not realised the importance of Hamas’s election victory: Arab nationalism is dead."

If that is true, the EU and the US will have to ask whether supporting Fatah might serve only to create the pan-Islamist and anti-Western front they fear so much. They will also have to ask whether supporting Fatah makes a Palestinian civil war more or less likely.

Russian policy is opaque, US influence is in doubt and the new secretary-general of the United Nations is still finding his feet. It is reasonable to ask why the EU - as the fourth member of the Middle East quartet - is so eager to revitalise the group.

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